Plugin author guide — Agent templates

About 677 wordsAbout 2 min

Agent templates are reusable agent definitions that bundle name, system prompt, max steps, tool activations, and per-operation auto-approve defaults. They live as .json / .yaml / .yml files alongside your plugin’s source and are surfaced to operators as a gallery in the admin UI.

What travels in a template: activation (enabled) and per-operation auto_approve. What does NOT travel: tool settings, including passwords and API keys. Recipients must configure those in Settings → Tools after importing — the template UI surfaces this prominently before download.

Directory layout

your-plugin/
├── plugin.json
└── agent-templates/
    └── research-assistant.json

Declaring the path

Override agentTemplatePaths() on your plugin entry point:

final class YourPlugin extends AbstractPlugin
{
    public function agentTemplatePaths(): array
    {
        // Paths may point to directories (scanned depth-0) or individual files.
        return [__DIR__ . '/../agent-templates'];
    }
}

The scanner aggregates your paths alongside the framework’s agent-templates/ directory and any paths contributed by the project App. Templates are deduped by id.

JSON / YAML schema

The full schema lives at https://spora.dev/agent-template.schema.json. A minimal example:

{
  "$schema": "https://spora.dev/agent-template.schema.json",
  "id": "web-search/research-assistant",
  "name": "Research Assistant",
  "description": "Looks things up on the web and reports back.",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "agent": {
    "description": "Default research workflow.",
    "system_prompt": "You are a research assistant. Cite your sources.",
    "max_steps": 12,
    "allow_continuation": true,
    "retry_after_minutes": 5,
    "max_retries": 2
  },
  "tools": [
    {
      "tool_class": "Spora\\Tools\\CalculatorTool",
      "enabled": true,
      "operations": [{ "name": "calculate", "enabled": true, "auto_approve": true }]
    },
    {
      "tool_class": "Spora\\Plugins\\WebSearch\\Tools\\SearchTool",
      "enabled": true,
      "operations": [
        { "name": "search", "enabled": true, "auto_approve": false },
        { "name": "fetch", "enabled": true, "auto_approve": false }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "required_plugins": ["web-search"],
  "metadata": {
    "category": "research",
    "icon": "globe"
  }
}

Namespace prefix required. Plugin templates must declare an id of the form <plugin-slug>/<slug> — e.g. "id": "web-search/research-assistant" for a plugin whose slug is web-search. Bare slugs (no /) are reserved for user-exported uploads and trigger a NAMESPACE_MISMATCH warning at scan time. See Agent template schema → id for the exact regex.

YAML is accepted for third-party plugins. The framework itself ships JSON so diffs stay clean.

Operator experience

Operator opens the agent gallery in the admin UI and picks your template.
The validator surfaces any non-fatal warnings:
- PLUGIN_MISSING — a slug in required_plugins is not installed.
- TOOL_PLUGIN_MISSING — a tool_class is not currently registered.
- TOOL_NEEDS_CONFIGURATION — a tool will be enabled but missing required settings.
- OPERATION_UNKNOWN — an operation name is not declared by the tool’s #[ToolOperation] set.
The operator can Import anyway — disabled/missing tools are silently skipped; warnings stay attached to the new agent for follow-up.
After import, the operator configures API keys in Settings → Tools.

Warning codes

Code	Severity	Meaning
`PLUGIN_MISSING`	warning	A `required_plugins` slug is not loaded.
`TOOL_PLUGIN_MISSING`	warning	A `tool_class` is not currently registered. Skipped silently.
`TOOL_NEEDS_CONFIGURATION`	warning	The tool will be enabled but is missing required settings.
`OPERATION_UNKNOWN`	warning	An operation name is not declared by the tool. Skipped silently.
`SYSTEM_PROMPT_MISSING`	warning	The template did not declare a `system_prompt`.
`METADATA_CATEGORY_UNKNOWN`	warning	`metadata.category` is not in the known enum.

None of these abort the import. The importer collects them all and returns them in ImportResult.warnings[].

Auto-install policy

Plugins are never auto-installed by the template importer. required_plugins is advisory only — operators must visit the Plugins page to install missing plugins manually. This is a deliberate safety choice: a downloaded template cannot silently add code to the host application.

Round-trip example

Operator configures an agent in the UI, sets auto_approve: false on a few save operations.
Clicks Export on the agent toolbar → downloads {template-id}.json.
Shares the file. The recipient clicks Import template on their dashboard, picks the file.
The validator reports no warnings (all plugins installed) or lists missing-plugin warnings.
Recipient clicks Import anyway; the agent is created with the same activation + auto-approve configuration.

Author guide

Reference